After weeks (more like years) of thinking about starting blogging, of debating whether or not I have something interesting to contribute to this thing we call the world wide web, and of endlessly ruminating on why I should even start blogging, I've finally decided to just shut up and do it. As by first post ever, I've decided to discuss the reasons that pushed me to finally start publishing my thoughts on the web in the hopes that this will help someone else going through the same hesitation.

Putting the Feynman Technique into Practice

Applying the Feynman technique was the main motivator. The main idea is that if you have a deep understanding of some concept then you should be able to explain it to someone, that knows nothing about that particular subject, in an intuitive and easily understandable way. The technique is fairly simple:

After reading about a new concept, take a sheet of paper and write the name of the concept on the top of the paper.
Write down everything you know about the concept in plain english (no jargon, simple short words) as if you want to teach it to a total beginner in the field. Doing this will highlight the parts you don't fully understand. Take note of these.
Go back to the literature and reviews the parts you don't yet master and repeat step 2 until satisfied.

Accountability

That's all fine and dandy, but why do I need a blog to apply the Feynman technique. It's because I need to be accountable to someone in order to be sufficiently motivated to go through with the whole process. Maintaining a blog, although it most probably will not have a significant following at first (or maybe ever), is the perfect way to give myself a sense of obligation to consistently write new content to keep it fresh and interesting.

Productive Procrastination

Let's be honest, most (all?) of us procrastinate, some more than others, but we do and I'm no different. Sometimes I procrastinate a lot, seriously, a LOT. In grad school, I often found myself wasting whole days because I had writers block for my thesis or I lacked inspiration for new experiments or analysis I could do. I noticed a pattern in my procrastination; I usually got lost in interesting TED or technology conference videos, articles about exciting new technologies from hacker news, and playing around with my side projects. Why not write a blog post about the new stuff I learn while procrastinating? What a great idea! Plus, I get the benefits of the Feynman technique discussed earlier. Everything is coming together nicely.

Virtual (public) Notebook

One other very important benefit I get by writing blog posts about the stuff I learn about is that I have and archive of searchable and organized notes of all the things I learned that I can use for reference. This is by far preferable to my current method of having a ton of loose leafs all over my office with scribbles on them.

So, if you are reading this and you find yourself, like me, in a fierce internal debate on weather or not to start a blog, do it.